Superlative - Supernative See-Saw

Trapped in their hyperbolic techno-utopian and techno-dystopian cul-de-sacs, even reasonably sensible, reasonably well-meaning transhumanist-types and bioconservatives-types (there are some of both, but always only up to a certain point) like to express incomprehension and exasperation at my positions. They tend to shift from fulsome approval of some things I write and then straight away to an equally ferocious disapproval of others. This should really be all well and good, contribution of different perspectives and all that. But all too often our Biocons and Robot Cultists seem to want to accuse me of logical inconsistency or even cynical rhetorical fun and games for provoking in them these surreally see-sawing assessments.

But as far as I can tell, my position is not only quite consistent but not even that extraordinary for all the confusion it seems to provoke in those who have bought into technocentric superlativity or supernativity.

I am enthusiastic about informed nonduressed consensual recourse to -- as well as disinterest in -- particular medical techniques (or aesthetical techniques, or spiritual techniques, or erotical techniques, or agricultural techniques, or what have you), whether "normalizing" or not, whether conventional or emerging, whenever they are actually wanted, well regulated, and reasonably safe, especially to the extent that progressives can make them universally available and struggle to make the risks, costs, and benefits of their development sustainable and fair.

This is a mainstream progressive position as far as I can see, or at any rate perfectly mainstream-legible.

I don't think I even think about "technology" in the way demonized or fetishized by bioconservative and transhumanist discourses. I don't believe there is a monolithic technological "it" to be "enthusiastic" about. I don't believe in technology "in general."

Certainly, I abhor the notion of parochial customs treated as "natural" in the service of incumbent interests (bioconservatism) or the notion of parochial wish-fulfillment fantasies treated as "optimal" in the service of self-appointed elites (transhumanism).

My enthusiasm is for democratizing social struggle that solves shared problems and contributes to ever more consensual and sustainable planetary lifeway multiculture, peer to peer.

I am enthusiastic about solving shared problems, peer to peer, and about consensual creative expressivity in all its diversity.

Secular. Democratic. Progressive. Multicultural. Green. Left. All completely commonplace, surely?

Problem-solving and creative expressivity inevitably make recourse to technique, inevitably make recourse to a common archive of accomplishments, and inevitably release forces into a shared world for which there will be unintended consequences. Technodevelopmental social struggle is conventional politics in history, democracy against elitism, responsibility against incumbency, same as it ever was.

There is no need for a faux-fantastic future or faux-nostalgic Golden Age in which to invest your imaginative and practical energies to the cost of democratic social struggle here and now. There is no need for the false idealizations of a homo superior or homo naturalis with which to identify to the cost of the fellows with whom you actually share a world of problems and promise, peer to peer. No, there are just peers in a present emerging into an open futurity just as problematic, just as promising -- and if we make it so -- just as free, another present, another world of peers.

Being "for" or "against" Technology in some general monolithic construal is stupid, being "for" or "against" some dreaded or wish-fulfilling fantasy you parochially identify as "The Future" is stupid. It's stupid and it makes people stupid and it makes everybody talk about the vicissitudes of technodevelopmental social struggle in stupid ways.

That is to say, technocentric and futurological discourses are beside the point -- if you want to think clearly about the terrain of technodevelopmental social struggle as it is playing out in the actual world -- they are distractions from or disavowals of the actual matters at hand, yielding their substantial effects, such as they are, entirely within the conventional political terms they claim to circumvent or disdain (usually both supernativisms and superlativisms conduce to elitist formations and hence to the politics of the Right, even among partisans of the Left who espouse them).

And again, no, I don't claim that any of this is particularly original or difficult to understand. It's just democratically-minded secular progressive good sense applied in a straightforward manner to questions of technodevelopmental social struggle.

If this seems inconsistent, incomprehensible, or outrageous to you, are you quite sure this isn't a sign of your own confusion in these matters rather than your brilliant superiority?

If, rather, this seems false, facile, or fatuous to you, are you quite sure that behind all the handwaving about Robot Gods and designer babies and utility-fog and clone armies and all the rest, you aren't actually just a fairly conventional right-wing corporatist, militarist, religionist, or bigot?